Title:
The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Ante-Bellum South
Author:
John Blassingame
Year of Publication:
1972
Thesis:
Adds slave narratives to the list of common sources to balance a sense of what enslaved people thought and felt about their condition. Defining slavery as a "total institution" such as the U.S. military, U.S. prisons, and the Holocaust and combining methodologies in psychology (interpersonal theory, among others - 184), Blassingame concludes that proximity to freedom of action, expression, and love allowed for more personality types than the infantilized "Sambo" caricature.
"The inescapable conclusion which emerges from an examination of several different kids of sources is that there were many different slave personality types. Sambo was one of them. but because masters varied so much in characer, the system was open at certain points, and the slave quarters, religion, and family helped to shape behavior, it was not the dominant slave personality. Rather than identifying with and submitting totally to his master, the save held onto many remnants of his African culture, gained a sense of worth in the quarters, spent most of his time free from surveillance by whites, controlled important aspects of his life, and did some personally meaningful things on his own volition. This relative freedom of thought and action hlped the slave to preserve his personal autonomy and to create a culture which has contributed much to American life and thought." (viii)
Time:
19th century prior to Civil War
Geography:
Plantation South
Organization:
I. Enslavement, Acculturation, and African Survivals
II. Cutlure
III. The Slave Family
IV. Rebels and Runaways
V. Plantation Stereotypes and Roles
VI. Plantation Realities
VII. Slave Personality Types
- In some places, this seems like an explanation of Du Bois's double consciousness. In other places, he seems to be arguing for infantilization.
- This analysis seems to argue that the imminent threat of death has an infantilizing effect, and that the degree of surveillance and violence will determine the degree of infantilization. This marks Jews as almost totally infantlized by the Holocaust, even though he shows examples of some people who had influences that led them to be more prone to survival
- This is not a typology of personality types of enslaved people; unless we consider the types to be "house" and "field" as well as "Sambo" (infantilized) and more resilient enslaved people.
Appendix: A Comparative Examination of Total Institutions
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Critical Essay on Sources
Select Bibliography
Type:
Methods:
Psychological analyses
Sources:
"white autobiographies, plantation records, agricultural journals, and travel accounts." (viii) Also includes travel and slave narratives.
Historiography:
Keywords:
Themes:
Critiques:
- I would like more info about where some of the images came from and analysis of them.
- This could probably use more analysis of how a 20th century phenomenon such as the Holocaust (or more broad, ahistorical comparison such as "prisons" could be considered a useful comparison to slavery. Also, could guess at the reasons why Blassingame didn't include genocide against Native Americans, but it makes sense to spell it out
- Develops a good rationale for why we should look at narratives of enslaved people (they describe emotions and thoughts of enslaved people best).
- Ironic that he dismisses Harriet Jacobs and embraces Gustavus Vassa
- "While slaves were generally submissive, they did not regress to the infantile dependency, extreme obsequiousness, unquestioning obedience, and abject docility of the concentration camp inmate primarily because they were not treated as harshly as the inmates. Whatever the cruelty inherent in slavery, the slaves were not systematically starved, forced to stand naked for hours in freezing weather, worked eighteen hours daily, and customarily tortured and murdered as the concentration camp victims were." (214)
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